​Reckless

Rachel Fitzsimmons adores Christmas: the carols on the radio, giving gifts, the sound and smell of snow. She is absolutely euphoric one Christmas Eve until her husband Tom confesses he’s taken a contract out on her life. This news forces Rachel to ee their cozy suburban home and plunge into unpredictably real life, which includes murder, embezzlement, psychiatric sessions, appearances on a humiliating quiz show, and a questionable talk show. Her companions in this mayhem include Lloyd, a physical therapist; Pooty, his paraplegic mute girlfriend; Roy, a charity organization director and Trish, a sour bookkeeper. Rachel discovers they all have secrets to burn and so she asks, “Do you think we ever really know other people?” In trying to answer that question, the playwright comically deals with some dark subjects―pain, loss, alienation and the general chaos of the universe.

Craig Lucas' Reckless is a bittersweet Christmas fable for our time: ''It's a Wonderful Life'' as it might be reimagined for a bruising contemporary America in which homelessness may be a pervasive spiritual condition rather than a sociological crisis. ''Life's been reckless with these people,'' we're told of the homeless people inhabiting a shelter. Mr. Lucas feels for all victims of life's recklessness - from those psychotic homeless who ''carry no identification whatsover'' to the ordinary rest of us whose own intimations of homelessness and death must arrive sooner or later with one hurtful form or another of parental abandonment.